Doing community for the long haul

For some reason I have been putting off writing this one, perhaps because it feels vunerable to me in this (public) context of my life. That said I am pushing through as I think there is some interesting content and idea's to be had below.

The content below started to form in my head from some questions posed by Tim Schilling in the Djangonaut Space Discord space. Session 5 has just started which is great, but his question was what to do around those that don't get selected? My initial response to this was maybe something along the lines of mastermind groups that are fairly common in other communities, for me I have seen it within founder circles where those at a similar level come together to help each other out.

What's key for both Djangonaut Space and mastermind's is that they are small groups. Carlton highlighted small groups in his DjangoCon Europe talk this year, especially in regards to trusting others. I have seen this with Moderators and Helpers in the Discord server, the smaller space allows for increased trust, which in turn allows for other conversations to happen that are not purely about Django, they are about our broader lives and that's part of what creates community that lasts.

But what does any of the above do with the Church? Well it's some of the context the has been mulling around in my brain and a couple of weeks back I realised something. From wider meta perspective the Church (and likely other religions, although I more familiar with the Church) is fairly similar to Open Source Software. The Church has multiple different denominations that have different views on the details, but generally the believe in the Christian God and that Jesus was the Son of God. OSS is similar in that the main thing in making the source code available for others is a good thing to do. The Church can have small expressions and larger expressions, similar with OSS, there are small hobby projects and larger projects like Python or Django. Finally they are both forms of community made of imperfect humans trying (for the most part) to do their best and make this world a better place. My personal challenge here is to love a person as per my belief (love one my neighbour as myself) while not agreeing with what they stand for. There are plenty examples in both spaces of those that don't share my point of view.

So can we learn anything from the Church? It has existed ~100 times longer than Django so perhaps there are things to learn in how it does community. It can vary wildly. but generally there is some regular meetings where teaching is given, around this teaching there are coffee drank and conversations had. It's the entrance to the community, it's easy to get come along and see if you personally like it. Beyond that there are volunteer opportunities to help others, but also small groups that meet regularly to do life together. A church may also have outreach events that are more social in nature or help those in need.

It's fairly easy to see that in the Django community we have volunteer's that give their time either in a formal capacity on the Board, a Team, a Working Group or at a conference, but also informally by simply helping others in the community. I would propose one part that's missing is smaller groups. Djangonaut Space is a start here, but it's very easy for someone to drop off after wards. To some degree that's always going to happen. Small groups are more about peer leadership and while might need some help from a central place to get started, each group would want to be self sustaining. It's about having Django as the common thread (say perhaps starting to contribute), but it's also doing life together, supporting each other through the ups and downs of life. This could be a longer term view of mentoring with each person bringing their problems and others helping to solve it. We're a relatively big community so it's easy to get lost and not feel like you belong. That's where community needs to be smaller, for trust to build, to feel belonging.

Another finaly interesting comparison is to look at the tools that exist to support churches from the backoffice. It's a specific niche of software that has evolved, which would map fairly well to organising the Django community. The software exists to support the building of a community to an extent. The core compnents are tracking community members, organising community events, managing teams and small groups and finally managing donations. The Django Project website has beginnings of some of these elements and I'm excited to further build some of this functionality to enable us to build a stronger, deeper community for those that want it.